Wednesday, September 27, 2006

Gaah!


This is the drawing I've been trying to upload for the past week. Grump.

Sorry I've been posting so irregularly - I'm in the middle of broadband installation hell - configuring my old D-Link wireless router to work with the new BT account for the flat. The annoying thing is, configuring it was pretty straightforward as per BT's instructions, and now it and the Macs tell me I'm connected to the Internet, but any attempt to actually collect mail or browse a web page just results in the activity timing out...

So, while I'm paying for a broadband account I can't use, I feel constrained to spend my time trying to wrangle the b*st*rd rather than paying to use the Internet café. This is made particularly annoying by the fact that we had to take out a year's contract despite being here for only four months, and waited two weeks for installation, so I'd be wasting eight-and-a-half months of the contract even if the thing worked first time (I know I could transfer the contract back home, but I'm happy with the cable supplier we already use there).
Anyway, as of 11.50am, during one of those "I just thought of one more thing" tries to get the damn thing working, I discovered the if the laptop is on the floor in the corner of the living room, I can ponce off a neighbour's unsecured wireless network. So that's why you're getting this now.

Grump.

7 comments:

Anonymous said...

Hah, welcome to my world Matt as regard networking problems.
Sometimes a length of string and a couple of tin can is the best option, I find.
Great picture. You look like you're wearing a 60's Star Trek uniform. Good job it's not a red top cos' that'd mean you're for the chop come the next away mission.
I suppose you are on a kind of away mission, being up with the Scots folks :)

Anonymous said...

yep, this is universal problem I´m afraid.
It´s the same s···t in Spain.

I try to use string and a couple of tin too.

Anonymous said...

mooncat mutters:

sounds like it might be a DNS problem mat - see if you can get an IP address in the browser like:
212.58.224.126
as this will answer this.

The problem with bt is their support is scripted - if you deviate from the script (have a mac) they just don't have the wherewithall to assist you as there's no genuine knowledge

Jo Bling said...

Nice Matt. Touch of the Kev O'Neills in this. In a nice way, of course :-)

C

Unknown said...

Thanks for the support, everyone - in fact, despite the clouds of obfuscation created by BT's poor communication and failure to deliver a Welcome Pack, my problems have turned out to be with my old router; when I finally, out of desperation, reset it to the factory defaults and re-entered the login information from cold, I got a connection for about half an hour, then the whole thing died; no network, no wireless, no ethernet, no nottin'. I decided to cut the Gordian Knot and am awaiting a new router for Amazon...

Anonymous said...

monocat mutters:

ah - well - that's kinda a difficult thing to predect & diagnose as what's wrong - i mean - in the balance of probibility why should it be wrong (but as my fellow work techie often quotes to callers in this situation, "Why does your car break down"?)

Unknown said...

I suspect it may have been a long-term problem - since I first got it in 2002, it would randomly cease to broadcast wirelessly once or twice a day - solved by pulling the plug and powering back up. In recent years this had gone up to once every couple of hours, but when we got it to Edinburgh, it was locking up every five minutes or so, or the moment a computer was added to (or left) the network.
At least it had the decency to out-and-out die, which forced us into the straightforward remedy of replacing it; the new router arrived this morning and pretty much configured itself in about 30 seconds...